When I came to Europe in September 1988, Europe had a wall. Reagan, Thatcher and Pope Jean Paul were intent on shifting the tides of history, and the Berlin Wall fell in 1989. In Paris where I was living, I had to finagle the system to get a work permit as a student, and travelling across Europe was massively made more easy with the arrival of Schengen accord in 1995. I have watched over the past 25+ years as the infrastructure of a common market was formed from the Maastricht to the Lisbon treaty, to the Channel Tunnel and the Euro. All of these tools built a European marketplace for its business people and its consumers not to mention its employees to benefit from and contribute to.

Coming out of INSEAD in 1997, one of Europe’s top business schools, I had a network of friends across Europe, and so, launched First Tuesday,a people network of Internet entrepreneurs to solve the inherent problem of how to build a pan-European Internet business without taking on the fixed costs of offices without recurring revenue streams.It’s been imitated and used as inspiration for a lot of start-up initiatives as it was the first, and it had tremendous momentum with more than 500,000 members at its heyday.The further the entrepreneurs were from the ‘center’ of Europe, the more they needed a way of connecting them into the infrastructure of the financing of entrepreneurship in Europe. Even today as I criss-cross Europe speaking at various Start-up Summit, I find myself in conference center auditoriums where 20 start-ups are on stage, and 200 investors or corporates are in the audience. I always think the same thing at the end: If the only people who hear about those start-ups are the 200 in the room, then it’s a big so what. The inherent ‘discoverability’ of start-ups, or lack thereof, in pockets of Europe remains one of the biggest issues. To build pan-European Internet businesses, they have to scale across cultural, linguistic and geographical borders.

So back to Juncker. Would it make sense to create a federal Europe then so that new, young European businesses could scale more quickly?

Without question, harmonising infrastructure and productivity tools so that legal and employment matters mirrored each other more across Europe would help. I’ve long said that society works best when it’s organised around the entrepreneur. This is not meant to be a flippant worship of the entrepreneur, but rather a considered view that the contributions they make are disproportional to their numbers. Surveys throughout the world repeatedly show that the high-growth start-ups and SME’s create jobs. In the UK, NESTA has a ‘Vital 6%’ survey that they do annually which shows that 6% of all companies – those who are high-growth SME’s – create 52% of all the net new jobs. Surely job growth is one of a nation’s first priorities anywhere?

Then if we think about what most new, young companies do – they create products and services that make life better, easier and more wonderful - consumers across Europe benefit too.

So the European citizen benefits both as an employee and as a consumer the more entrepreneurship is fostered and the faster it scales companies. But what about the less fortunate who are not all alpha achievers? As people become wealthy, most of them want to take care of their fellow man. It’s true that there are some real bastards out there that are self-centered and win/lose people. But entrepreneurs are the most generous people I’ve ever encountered. They constantly try to throw some good will into the universe and help people as they have been helped along the way.

If we really believed that Europe works best if it organised itself around its entrepreneurs, we would act very differently indeed. If we felt our life depended on it, we would prioritize tax relief for young companies that are hiring a lot of people. We would put our successful entrepreneurs on the front page of the national newspapers rather than wondering what corners they’ve cut to get where they’ve got to.

We would organize society around the entrepreneur because they are willing to live abnormal lives to bring the future to the present.

Europe is being redefined by its entrepreneurs today. The economic growth coming from the high-growth, young companies sprouting up across Europe give its 450 million people the best opportunity to continue to have the high living conditions that they have enjoyed from the industrialist of yesteryear.

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